In A Mother's Heart
by the ramblin rose
Summary: Caryl oneshot. Season 3, but I've taken some liberties with the plot/timeline. Sometimes lovers have secrets. A mother's heart, too, is a place often full of her own secrets. She could guard them all.


**AN: This was done in response to an anon that appeared in the Caryl tag. It's just a one shot, but it's one that I wanted to do. **

**I'll give you a miscarriage warning. Nothing too graphic, but you should be aware of it. The event itself takes place in the third section. **

**I hope that you enjoy. Let me know what you think! **

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Carol knew they were all going to Woodbury. They were going, following after Michonne, the quiet and seemingly impenetrable new arrival to their group, to face this Governor head-on. They were going to get their people back.

Carol stood out by the prison, leaning against the wall, knowing that at some point they would pass through there. They would have to come out to pile into the vehicle that was already being loaded, and there she would be able to tell him goodbye without anyone suspecting a thing.

They had been together two or three times since their arrival the prison. The first time had started as nothing more than a joke.

_Kinda romantic…screw around?_ She'd asked him, teasing him over the fact that she wasn't completely unaware of the glances that he gave her and she didn't miss that he took every opportunity he had to move their bedrolls closer together at night, all in the name of warmth, of course.

She'd expected pretty much the response she'd gotten from him, too. The shocked expression, the choking snort. She'd expected him to do exactly what he'd done and dismiss her teasing with his own embarrassment at being caught. Because she doubted that Daryl Dixon had ever been caught by any woman.

_Even better._ She'd responded to him after he'd offered to "go down first" on their descent off the flipped bus on which they were keeping guard. She couldn't help but tease him because he looked so cute when he was flustered.

_She'd find out that he really looked cute when he got even more flustered._

And she'd expected then, from him, the "Stop" that he'd thrown back at her to say that he'd reached the point of all the teasing that his shy sensitivities could manage for one day. She'd expected that to be the end of it too.

So she hadn't said anything when, reaching up to help her down, he'd let his hands start to catch her at the hip and slide up her body all the way to her rib cage. She hadn't said anything when, holding her there against the back of the bus, out of the vision of anyone at the camp fire, he'd rubbed the thumbs that had landed on the sides of her breasts suggestively. She hadn't said anything, even when he'd taken a chance and kissed her tentatively, a kiss that she returned with everything in her because she didn't want him to doubt, not for a moment, that she wanted his kiss…and she wanted anything else that he wanted to give her…and she wasn't teasing.

So she'd taken what she was sure was Daryl's virginity, though he'd never come right out and admitted it, right there on the ground behind a flipped over bus in a prison yard.

_More romantic love stories had never been penned by any author._

After that they'd been together two or maybe three more times. Most of them were hungry embraces. They were quick and they were often hard. Had it not been Daryl that had been the man she was with, if it hadn't been him, whom she was willing to forgive for all shortcomings, she might have refused him after that, feeling that her body didn't quite get the tenderness it craved from his almost animalistic lusting. But then, the last time…the last time had more than made up for it.

Because he'd found her. He'd found her in what she was sure would be her prison tomb and he'd brought her back to life, insisting himself on nursing her even before he would allow Hershel to see her or touch her. When he'd finally revealed to Hershel that he was keeping her there, squirreled away and protected in the cell he'd placed her in, he'd left the space to allow the man to examine her…head to toe…to verify her health.

After all, he was pretending that she was modest and that he had never seen her body before.

But he'd come back, quietly that night, and he'd seen her body again. He'd seen it slowly and carefully and gently, fearing the whole time that she wasn't real…that she was a figment of his imagination created to keep the hurt of losing her away. He'd taken in every inch of her in careful study, and it had been, for her, the most passionate experience that she'd ever been involved in.

She had never felt love like she had at that moment, not for a man. It had rushed through her body and it had made up, if there was ever anything to really make up for, any of the other things that might have made her feel that he didn't really care for her.

And Carol didn't press him to tell everyone about their relationship because she understood that, maybe, for a man like Daryl who had gone so long in his life without ever even knowing a woman, it would be a difficult thing to take the heckling that was sure to follow when other men around him found out that he had finally settled in on one. So she didn't push him. Their time would come and she was infinitely patient.

As she leaned against the wall, waiting, she rocked and cooed at Judith in her arms. She felt, inside herself, the nervous chewing of her own thoughts.

Hershel knew their secret, but like a good doctor, had agreed to keep it. He'd agreed not to meddle in the situation and to let Carol talk to Daryl on her own time, just as she'd requested.

And she would talk to him, but she didn't want him to know, not before they went to Woodbury. If it came down to a fight, she wanted his head in the game. She wanted him to come back to her, safe and sound. She didn't want him distracted by anything that might end up getting him hurt.

When he got back there would be plenty of time to tell him about the tiny little fugitive that she was harboring. The tiny little creature that had most likely "sprung up" out of a night of playful "firsts" on the dirty ground behind a rusted bus. For now, she would hold the little one, as she'd been holding it without even knowing, all by herself. There would be plenty of time to tell Daryl about it when he returned.

When Daryl exited the prison, having to pass right by where she was standing with Judith in her arms, she felt his fingertips graze the top of her arm before she ever even noticed his presence. She turned and smiled, unable to help herself since the smile had almost been permanently part of her face since the day he'd found her in the tombs. He smiled in return and then offered a loving glance toward the baby in her arms…and for a moment, she imagined how happy he'd been when the newborn there was replaced by one with his eyes and nose…and then he brought his eyes back to her.

"Stay safe," he commanded, his voice soft, though not as soft as it has been when he'd buried his face in her neck, pretended he wasn't brought to tears, and told her how afraid he'd been that she was gone…that she wasn't safe.

Keeping her role as the sacred guardian of their secrets…of all their secrets, Carol smiled at him softly.

"Nine lives, remember?" She responded. _And maybe one more now for good measure._

And she'd relaxed and leaned back against the prison wall, the glow in his eyes enough to serve as even a goodbye kiss, as she'd watched him load up with the others, going out to be a savior and bring back those that they'd lost.

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Her heart leapt around and danced inside her chest, keeping in rhythm with the flipping and rolling of her stomach when she heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. She'd been keeping watch, insisting that she be by the gates, since they left. She needed to be there when he got back. She craved, even after the short absence, the sight of his face again.

It would be all she could do not to leap into his arms as soon as he got out of the vehicle and whisper into his ear that since he left…since she found out really…all she'd been able to think about was telling him the news of the tiny Dixon who was still too small to see and too small to feel in any other way than with her heart.

And her anticipation of his arrival and her growing worry over each ticking moment of the absence had made it seem like he'd been gone a million years.

She helped to pull back the gate, letting in the car, and immediately Rick got out as though he were going to try to tell her something. He tried to speak to her, but she immediately ran to start looking in the windows of the car…she hadn't seen Daryl in it as they were driving up and she was hoping he'd just been bent over, doing something.

But he wasn't in there.

Daryl wasn't in the car.

And immediately she felt like her heart would explode at the fear that surged through her body.

"Daryl?" Had been all that she'd managed to get out, fighting back tears.

Rick, in his police officer manner, had held a hand up to her like that ever did a thing to calm a single soul that was suffering or on the verge of it. He told her that Daryl left. He may have told her other things…he may have tried to explain…but she hadn't heard anything beyond that.

"Daryl left? He's gone? He's not coming back?" The words fell out of her like a chain, all linked together. All of them rolled around and around in her brain with disbelief.

_Daryl left. Daryl was gone. Daryl wasn't coming back._

Instinctively she covered her belly, invisible to everyone's eye but her mind's, and tried to protect the baby there from the news that his father was gone. His father who had never even been given the chance to know that he existed, nestled warm and deep within her body, was gone. He wasn't coming back.

And Rick had been as comforting as he could, but there wasn't really much that Rick could do. Even his comforting was lacking because he thought, and he had no reason not to think this way, that he was simply comforting someone over the loss of their friend. He was comforting Carol over the loss of someone who had been a very, very dear friend to her.

He had no idea that he was comforting a woman over the loss of the man that she'd imagined was the love of her life, and that, simultaneously and secretly, he was comforting a mother over the fact that her child's father wouldn't return and a child over the fact that he would never know the wonderful man who had been responsible for his coming into being in the first place.

Rick couldn't comfort her, not really, because he could only begin to even imagine the scope of the shock that was searing through her right now and doing nothing more than bringing out choked sobs as she tried, with weak efforts, to convince herself that it was simply a bad dream that she'd wake up from…a dream that she'd wake from, wrapped in his arms, able to tell him the news that she never should have kept from him.

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Carol shook her head at Hershel and tried to refuse the wet rag that he mopped at her face with even while he talked to her in the most soothing "bedside" voice that he could muster, having only truly had practice calming animals as his patients.

"You need to take the time off," he said. "You need to rest. This is proof, Carol, that you're tired and your body can't handle anymore. Give it a break. You take a break."

Carol felt herself dissolve into the sobs once more and he pulled her into him, sitting beside her on the bed, to stifle the crying with his shoulder. She wrapped her arms around him, finding the only comfort that she'd really found thus far, with his arms wrapped around her.

He was the only one who had known her secret. He had been the only one that had known that what she and Daryl had went beyond just the friendship the world suspected it to be.

And now? Now he was the only one who knew that her suffering wasn't related to some kind of special stage of menopause, what she'd told Beth and he'd reluctantly, and falsely, confirmed, after she'd ignored the cramping and every other piece of evidence until the blood she couldn't control had given her away and driven her inside, abandoning the work she tried to do double time to occupy a mind that she was sure was trying to kill her.

The blood had scared Beth…too heavy for a period…but she'd believed Carol's efforts, even as she'd choked back her own sobs over knowing what it really was, that it was only something that sometimes happened when a woman, like herself, reached a certain age and hadn't gone through menstruation for some time…it was a good thing…that's what she'd told Beth.

But it was really just another of the terrible things that seemed to happen to her.

She was beginning to feel like, in this world, she wasn't even allowed the meagre happiness that others seemed to find here and there.

The one thing she'd felt she had to hold onto, the one piece of Daryl that she had left, and her one chance at making up for being the terrible mother that she'd felt she'd been to deserve to lose Sophia like she had, it was gone.

All that she'd put behind it and all she'd dared to dream in the little time that she'd known about it, was now gone. It was no more than some stains that she wouldn't have the care to try to wash out of anything…she'd burn everything bloodied even in the slightest…alone and in her own sort of "funeral" act.

Her mind and her body had betrayed her. Her grief over Daryl, which had fed grief she'd thought she'd buried over Sophia, her worry about doing this alone, and her concern over the fact that to one child she'd given a worthless father while to the other she'd given no father at all…all of it had finally taken from her what she had left.

"You can't say anything," she said to Hershel, gaining air again for the first time since the last wave of sobs had started. "Please, just don't say anything."

Hershel held her tight in the hug and rubbed her back with his hands.

"Might make you feel better," he said, "to talk about it."

"No," she replied. "He didn't know about it. I don't want them to know about it either. Please? You can't say anything."

So he'd finally agreed, as long as she agreed to stay in bed for the day and rest while he made up some story that would suit everyone…some story of malnutrition and still recovering from having been lost in the tombs…some story that was only partially true.

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When he'd returned, Carol had done everything she could to keep control of her feelings, the good and the bad.

She should have felt overjoyed to see his face again, and she was happy to see it, but there was a weight in her chest that held her down…it should have been a weight in her belly, one she was thrilled to share with him.

She should have greeted him, welcomed him back to the prison, with the promise of new life, but instead she felt like the very vessel of death.

She hid everything from him, as well as she could, as he went around greeting those who met him with open arms, and even as he dealt with discussions of what to do with his brother now that Merle had come into the prison with him and there were several who didn't want the man there.

The night that he'd returned, he come to her cell, like the walking wounded, and asked her if she would take him back. He'd asked her if he still had a place in her heart and in her arms. He'd asked if she could forgive him for leaving her for his brother. Dixons, after all, had a code. Family meant a lot in that code.

And Carol had assured him that she did have a place for him. She always would. She'd assured him that her feelings on him hadn't changed. She still loved him and that would be something that would last forever…in a world where it seemed that nothing else did.

She never told him that she had been as much a Dixon as she imagined anyone could be, carrying her own tiny Dixon along with her for far too short a period of time.

She never told him anything, in fact, of the little one. And Hershel, steadfast and trustworthy as he was, never opened his lips to a soul about it either.

Merle was back and that was going to cause enough problems for Daryl to deal with. It was evident, looking at him even after she'd allowed him to take in everything he wanted of her body with his own, that he was suffering just from the proximity of his brother and his fear over what Merle Dixon might do to the man that Daryl had worked to become in his absence.

So she'd declared to Daryl, there in her cell, that she would guard their relationship between the two of them, just in case Merle didn't take the news too well, after all he might have in his mind a different woman that his brother should welcome into the Dixon clan, until Daryl felt that it was time to tell everyone.

She could love him forever, and she guard their secret as long as it needed to be guarded…because she'd already decided that she would be keeping another, alone, for as long as she lived.

And the little Dixon who couldn't quite manage to live in her body, would live in her heart until she took him silently to her grave with her, along with all the memory of everything else she'd held dear and precious and lost in her life.


End file.
